Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
RFC 1738 - 3.6. NEWS

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### 3.6. NEWS

The news URL scheme is used to refer to either news groups or individual articles of USENET news, as specified in RFC 1036.

A news URL takes one of two forms:

         news:<newsgroup-name>
         news:<message-id>

A <newsgroup-name> is a period-delimited hierarchical name, such as "comp.infosystems.www.misc". A <message-id> corresponds to the Message-ID of section 2.1.5 of RFC 1036, without the enclosing "<" and ">"; it takes the form <unique>@<full_domain_name>. A message identifier may be distinguished from a news group name by the presence of the commercial at "@" character. No additional characters are reserved within the components of a news URL.

If <newsgroup-name> is "*" (as in <URL:news:*>), it is used to refer to "all available news groups".

The news URLs are unusual in that by themselves, they do not contain sufficient information to locate a single resource, but, rather, are location-independent.

Next: 3.7. NNTP

Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
RFC 1738 - 3.6. NEWS